Hayley Tsukayama

After House Commerce Committee GOP leadership asked Apple about its data collection practices, the company has now replied. Apple said that its Siri voice assistant does not collect data unless it hears the trigger phrase, “Hey Siri.” The company also said it does not share any “Siri utterances” to third parties. Apple also laid out many of the policies it has shared publicly about its data collection and data use practices, which reflect what consumers see in the privacy policies they’re asked to review when they buy an Apple device.

All 2.2 billion people who use Facebook will soon see changes to their privacy settings, in response to a sweeping new privacy law in Europe — but American users won't see exactly the same thing as their European counterparts.

Apple said that it will spend $350 billion in development and create 20,000 jobs to the United States in the next five years, following the recent corporate tax changes and a greater push to increase manufacturing in the US.  As part of this investment, it will also build a new U.S. campus — focused on technical support for customers — in a location to be announced later in 2018.

One of the many buzzwords at this week's CES technology show is "blockchain" — the technology underpinning the bitcoin craze. While bitcoin is the flash of the moment, there's growing excitement about how this concept can move beyond digital currency and affect people's lives. Simply put, blockchain is like a ledger book that can be group-edited by people in the cloud. There's no central company or government that has to verify a transaction, which means thing can move more quickly. As changes are made, it keeps a public log of what changed, when and how.

Some Twitter users have called, repeatedly, for the social network to block President Donald Trump's account — but a new statement from Twitter essentially says that is not going to happen. Twitter has previously responded to complaints about President Trump's account by saying that certain users' tweets have a “newsworthiness” value that makes it important to stay online and inform the network's global conversation. Its Jan 5 statement expanded on that idea, though this latest explanation did not mention President Trump by name.

Here's a fun question to pose at the family dinner table: have you ever heard of Alteryx? Whether you have or not, chances are good that it has heard of you. Alteryx is a data analytics company that makes its money by repackaging data that it has collected from different sources. And it became the latest reminder of how much data little-known companies have collected on us — and how little oversight there is over the security of that data. Data collection and analysis is a strong and growing multibillion dollar business, with thousands of firms.

The Internet Association -- which counts Google, Facebook, Twitter and others among its members -- reversed course and said it will support the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a bill designed to make it easier to sue websites that enable sex trafficking online. The bill has been a source of tension between the technology industry and Washington for months.

President Donald Trump boasted Nov 3 of his social media influence after his personal Twitter account was briefly deactivated by a departing company employee, raising serious questions about the security of tweets the president wields to set major policy agendas, connect with his voter base and lash out at his adversaries. The deactivation Nov 2 sparked deep and troubling questions about who has access to the president's personal account, @realDonaldTrump, and the power that access holds.

A new lawsuit claims that Confide, a privacy-focused messaging app reportedly used by several politicians including those in the Trump administration in February, may not be as secure as it has advertised. Filings from a proposed class-action lawsuit in New York say that Confide's contention that it does not allow its users to take screenshots of their messages isn't true. It specifically accuses Confide of breaching false advertising and deceptive business practices laws. The inability to keep a record of Confide messages is one of the product's most-touted features. If someone tries to take a picture of a conversation, Confide is supposed to kick out the person who took the screenshot and alert the other person in the conversation. It's also supposed to only let users see messages one line at a time, to prevent an entire message from ever being recorded, making it ideal for confidential messaging.

Let's be honest here — most of us don’t read the privacy policies for smart televisions. And even if we try to, it’s often difficult to read them, particularly on a television screen. So we asked a few legal experts who specialize in privacy — Christopher Dore of the Chicago-based law firm Edelson, Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland, William McGeveran of the University of Minnesota and Bradley Shear of Maryland-based Shear Law — to explain what we're really getting into when we hit the “I agree” button.